Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 220th episode of the Atlas Society. Ask. My name is Lawrence Levo, senior project manager for the Atlas Society, the leading nonprofit organization teaching young people about the ideas of Ayn Rand in creative ways, like animated videos and graphic novels. Our CEO, Jennifer Grossman, has the week off, but I am excited to have with me this week at the society senior fellows, Antonella Martijde, Robert Rusinski, along with a special guest, the secretary general of Fundalib, Juan Pina, in Spain. It's very late for him, so we appreciate him joining us today. Before I go into anything further, I want to first remind all of you, whether you're watching on Instagram x, Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube, you can use the comment section to type in your questions. And we'll try to get to as many of them as we can. Now, the reason for today's webinar, as you all can see from the title, is we're continuing our recent series of webinars looking at Latin America, specifically current events, as what's going on in Venezuela. So with the three panelists we have today, we're going to be exploring a bit more of the history of how things came to be, what's currently happening, and perhaps some predictions about what is, is what we can see happening in the future. So to start things off, I will pass things over to Antonella. Thank you for joining us.
[00:01:34] Speaker B: Thank you, Lawrence. Hi, everyone. Hi, Juan. Hi, Rob.
So thank you for being here today. It will be a pleasure to discuss the challenges of the region of Latin America, in particular the case of, of Venezuela. I recommend watching the webinar with it with Juan Pio to better understand how this regime in Venezuela came to power, and also to learn a little bit more about the country's history from the perspective of someone from Venezuela. As we know, there were elections a few weeks ago.
But as we, we all know, the venezuelan regime is a dictatorship that has been there for more than 20 years. And during these last few weeks, there haven't been basically any changes in the country. And honestly, I don't think there will be changes. I'm quite pessimistic about the situation in the country, especially because many geopolitical interests are a play, and particularly from countries like Russia.
And that's why I always insist on the mission of our organization and organizations like Kundalini in Spain to keep promoting the ideas of Iran and explain why we need those ideas to be applied in our region, but also in the entire world, and spread these ideas to young audiences, just like we do at Yahoo society. So we know that Nicolas Maduro's regime is basically composed of some of the most corrupt and criminal people.
They even have their own drug cartel, which is called Cartel de los Soles, which, you know, brings in vast amounts of money. And for this nationalist, Venezuela is just a business.
I see that Venezuela is a personal business. For Nicolas Maduro, it's like his own company. So the question is, and here I just opened the conversation, the question is like, what incentives would such a regime have to give up power?
Can we introduce this incentives incentive formula into the equation or the solution or trying to think when it comes to the future of Venezuela? How do you see it?
[00:04:30] Speaker C: Well, if I may, I would like to say that the time for the stick and the carrot is already passed. It is no longer possible to apply the stick and the carrots to a regime like this. And it was clear on the elections on the 28 July that this wouldn't be possible any longer. They have been pretending to be some way in the middle between them far left dictatorships like Cuba or Nicaragua and the normal countries in the region. But with this election, this is no longer the case. It has been fully and absolutely exposed that they are a complete dictatorship, a tyranny similar to North Korea or to other countries like Nicaragua or Cuba in the region. And so the carrot is no longer possible.
We can just use the stick now. And the stick should be an important one by the international community. I know that these days the European Parliament is going to debate on recognizing Edmundo Gonzalez as the winner of the elections and therefore the president elect of the Republic of Venezuela. So the same has been done by several countries around the world. And Antonella was mentioning the geopolitical reasons behind this continuation of the venezuelan regime as it is. And I would like to say that unfortunately, the spanish government is very much conditioned by this, by these geopolitical reasons and by, I would say, also by crony capitalism. One of our main major oil companies, revol, has very big interests in Venezuela. And unfortunately, they have such a big grip on their current left and far left coalition government, coalition cabinet in Madrid that contrary to the rest of Europe, the spanish government is sort of helping in a way, the venezuelan dictatorship. And although the spanish parliament has both houses of parliament, have now adopted resolutions in which they do recognize that Mundo Gonzalez as the valid president of Venezuela, the government is not doing anything. And it is very likely that our diplomatic relations will be severed, but not by us, but by the venezuelan regime, which has already kidnapped a couple of ordinary Spaniards who were there on a private visit and who have been labeled spies and foreign agents or whatever. And they have been, they are missing. Nobody knows where, where they are. And the crisis continues to mount with the spanish government, which is in turn trying to appease Maduro instead of taking a more serious stand, as in my opinion, they should. So I would like to leave it here by now so that we continue with the discussion. But my position is that unfortunately, although the European Union and other countries around the world are doing whatever they can to try to, to change the situation, the regime is now in a bunker and they will not easily leave power. And I think that the only possibility to kick them out would be not by diplomatic means, but by some kind of military commando actions in some way. Maybe not for an invasion of Venezuela, which would be a disaster, but maybe, for instance, to sort of take some of the big members of the regime, including Maduro himself, and catch them and bring them to the DEA, which has been for a very long time now having them wanted, and they are wanted internationally, and they are wanted by the International Criminal court as well, some of them. So that would be maybe one way to proceed because just politics is no longer, unfortunately, an option.
[00:08:44] Speaker D: If I could add something here, I think this really captures the dilemma of our current era, which is it's not just Venezuela, it's Iran, it's Russia, really, as the pioneer of this, is that there has been this resurgence of dictatorship and of authoritarianism.
You know, we had this great moment at the end of the cold war where, you know, the, the Soviet Union collapses and new democracies were created throughout Eastern Europe, throughout the world as the Soviet basically lost its grip. And then after that great leap forward, basically in human freedom, we call it a freedom recession. Some, you've had these countries like the Soviet Union, that if you oppress enough people, if you literally go to war with your own people on a permanent basis, which is essentially what's happened in Iran and Venezuela now and a number of other places, if you go permanently go to war with your own people, you can brass it out and there will be sanctions, but the sanctions won't really affect you at the time regime is, you know, you'll still be able to loot enough people to live in luxury. And so the dilemma has been created of how do you, how do we reverse this? How do we actually win these regimes in a way that I do think, you know, military resistance. I will say that, you know, I've been watching what's going on in Venezuela for, for several decades now from a distance. And at each point when there was a chance earlier on, the US, the international community, the Europeans kind of balked at it and they didn't assert it early on when you could have done something much easier. And I think that there's been this reluctance to take action. And that has been, hopefully we can reach a critical mass where enough people decide we actually have to do something and then find something that is effective, whether it's scale, military action or much harsher sanctions or whatever it would take.
[00:11:07] Speaker C: Yes, I would like to comment that. Yes, I fully agree with Rob's position on this. I see that some people in the panel are thinking about whether sanctions really work in this kind of situations. I would say that that depends very much from a country to country basis. It can change. There may be countries where it doesn't work, some others where it does. But the problem with the venezuelan regime is that contrary to what may seem, they are extremely rich. They have almost limitless funds to bribe anyone. Even in western countries like mine, they have a very, very close connection with the russian regime.
As you may know, there are already mercenaries, like troops, troops from the Warner group, the same group that has been active also in the Ukraine war and also especially in northern african coups recently in five or six countries which have been transferred from being sort of western related countries to being under, to becoming sort of russian protectorates.
And they are now in the streets of Venezuela and helping and assisting the venezuelan regime, not just the police forces, but especially the supporters of the regime who are acting violently against, against the opposition members and against the protesters in the streets. So the situation is very complicated now. And I think that sanctions alone on the members, on the top, on the cream of the venezuelan regime will not suffice. They can help, of course, but it will not be sufficient. And there is a need for something else. But we saw several years ago that there was this president in charge of the country, elected by the parliament, Mister Juan Guaido, and for some years the international community and the group of Lima, which was created by several latin american countries, neighbors of Venezuela, and wanting to help with the situation. Everybody was recognizing Guaido as the president instead of Maduro. And it didn't really help. There was a need for some kind of force action to be taken. And I think the United States at some point was prepared to lead that coalition and do something about Venezuela. But something happened. And what happened was that Mister Lavrov, the foreign minister of the Russian Federation, came in and said that they would not accept something like that. And unfortunately, the United States then backed down in its support to Mister Waido and really nothing happened. Now the situation is a bit more. It's a bit different now because there has been an election. It is no longer the former parliament electing someone instead of Maduro. It has been an election that was called for by the regime itself and which was organized exactly as the regime wanted. And the opposition cope with all the requirements that were imposed onto them. And it came from the Barbados agreements on the issue. Both parties had agreed on an electoral process. Both parties complied until some point. And then in the middle of the night of the election night, then something happened. They said they were out of power and the government just panicked and they started faking all the information that came out of the electoral committee. And then they started to even show figures which didn't even add up.
There was at some point more than 130% of the votes. If you added all the political parties, all the candidates, it was more than 100%, more than 130%. Even so, that was completely crazy. To this day, the regime has not been able to show any documentation of any of the states in Venezuela or even of any of the voting of the polling stations at all. It has been a complete disaster. And at the same time, the opposition has proved beyond any reasonable doubt that they have won the elections. And everybody knows that they have won the elections. And still that we come to the same situation as we had with Mister Guaido. There is no sufficient interest by the allies of the democracy in Venezuela to create an international coalition, maybe led by the US or maybe led by neighboring countries, which could intervene in the situation in Venezuela and simply make it possible for the venezuelan government to live and to allow for a transition. But there is one more thing to add to this, and it is that unfortunately, the venezuelan people are not rising up themselves, although they have suffered a lot and they have countless victims and heroes and martyrs over the years. But for some reason, it seems to be quite difficult in Venezuela to have an outcome similar to the Maidan in Kyiv back in the day when Yanukovych was ousted and Ukraine started its path towards the west. It doesn't seem to be so easily in Venezuela. And maybe the reason is because, well, 8 million people from Venezuela have actually needed to flee the country. So what remains in the country, although they are against the regime, as they have proved with the elections, with over 65 or 70, maybe around 70% of the votes being cast by the opposition candidate. But still one thing is voting against Maduro, and one other thing is facing the brutal consequences of actually doing something more than just voting. And that is, of course, a handicap for the cause of liberty in Venezuela.
[00:17:35] Speaker D: One thing I want to mention, though, is when you talk about venezuelan people risen up, they've actually been protesting against this for many, many years. I mean, it really caught my attention. I think it was 2003 when they actually had a general strike where they shut down the oil company and various things, and they actually have a massive general strike trying to get that again at the time, Hugo Chavez out of office or out of power. And so part of what happens is when a regime sort of makes war against its own citizens over a long enough period of time, it actually can get good at suppressing the ability and driving the most independent, the most active people get driven out of the country, and so they're driven into exile. I do think the rest of the world has to be on a sort of a, I think we have to get more on sort of a war footing. In a way, we're realizing that the threat of this kind of totalitarianism or authoritarianism, the threat of resurgent dictatorship, I think that should, you know, we could see that in Ukraine, where Europe and the US have supported the Ukrainians, but we've been sort of giving them enough aid to not be, to not lose, but not really giving them the aid they would need to win. And I think we've done a similar reluctance. And, you know, maybe especially in Latin America, hanging over all of this, of course, is the shadow of colonialism, the idea of, oh, american gunboat diplomacy going in there to solve problems. And the region, our, even our allies in the region have traditionally very strongly resisted that. But I think what they're going to have to do is they're going to have to decide, well, all right, then we have to take up the leadership and basically get rid of, solve this problem in our own backyards with american support. But the idea America is going to be in the lead of this, it comes up against that. History of anti colonialism became such a powerful slogan. Rightly or wrongly, I think it was overblown, but it became such a powerful slogan that America going in to do something became a discredited solution.
And somebody asked, why is socialism so popular in Venezuela? I see that in the chat. Part of it happens. I think it goes back to this sort of cold war background, because during the Cold War, we didn't really allow or we intervened. The US did, in fact, intervene or in some cases supported, quote unquote, friendly dictators, as in Chile with Pinochet.
We actively suppressed Latin America having its big experiment with socialism. We stopped that from happening a bunch of places because, of course, socialism merely meant you became part of the soviet empire, and we didn't want that to happen, so we suppressed that. And I think it was almost like socialism, communism was a mistake Latin America really wanted a chance to make. And the minute the cold war was over and we were like, yeah, whatever do we like, we don't care anymore because the Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore, they went out and they were bound and determined to make that mistake in a couple of different places. And so the lure of socialism around the world really is just this utopia that people think it's going to be, this utopia because they have this idea that society should take control, society should be supreme over the individual, and that would lead to a wonderful utopia. And they keep having to find out, experimenting it with again and again and again, having to find out that the exact opposite is true, that when you have individuals who are free to pursue their own interests in a free society, that's what leads to a better outcome. And that every time you have a government ruling on behalf of society as a whole and suppressing the individual, that it ends up leading not just to poverty, but also to oppression. And like I said, it's an experiment we've had to try and a lesson that people have had to learn. You know, in China, they have to learn it. In the rest of Asia, they had to learn it. In eastern Europe, we've had to learn it. Every continent, every region of the world, people have to try it and actually get the results and learn that lesson. And I think Latin America had to have their own shot at it. But I think it really is up to the neighbors of Venezuela, the other latin american countries to decide. We have to put it, we have to somehow gather the forces, get the will to put an end to this, because I, unfortunately, I don't think it. I don't think it's going to happen from within Venezuela, and I don't think. I don't think it's going to happen from the United States, you know, going back to gumbo diplomacy.
[00:22:12] Speaker C: Yes, absolutely.
I would like to add that the problem we have here is that, well, we, the west won the cold war, but we didn't realize we had won, or we just left the defeated parties or the soviet bloc to just recover from its injuries and came back for us. And this is what has happened. And in the case of Venezuela, I think it's Cuba's doing.
You know, in 1990, the Soviet Union collapsed. 1990, 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed and Cuba was desperate because without the umbrella support of the Soviet Union, they were nothing. And they desperately needed to go into another country, a large country, a country with petrol, with oil, like is the case of Venezuela, and control it. And they have this intent with Mister Rubo Chavez. First they tried to put him in power through a coup.
It didn't work. But then he became popular and he was elected a couple of years later. And that's where the nightmare of the Venezuelans started. Because the country is to a very large extent a cuban protectorate. There are thousands, literally thousands, I don't know, 4000, 5000 more than that, actually. Advisors and, you know, operatives of the cuban regime on the spot in Venezuela, assisting the government in everything and the military, etcetera. This is one consideration. The second consideration is that, well, Russia has been recovering step by step over the years. They support several far right parties and movements and governments around the world, but also the legacy far left ones that they inherited from the soviet times. And that includes Cuba and Nicaragua. And of course it includes the new development, which is Venezuela, which is the jewel of the crown for them on the Americas, which is a country much larger than any of the other two and much richer in terms of natural resources. So yes, there is a need for a coalition to do something with Venezuela. And I agree with Rob that maybe the United States should be providing like logistics support and intelligence support and training and, you know, this kind of support from outside. But maybe it would be better for many reasons, for many PR and geopolitical reasons, to keep it as a coalition of latin american countries. And of course it should be done at the request of the legitimate elected government and president of Venezuela. And if that happens, we still have some time, some months to maneuver, some months for diplomacy, because the constitutional takeover by the new president should happen at the beginning of January.
So there's still room for diplomacy for the US and the European Union and other and regional powers to try to convince Maduro for a transition, for a golden exile, keeping all the money that he has stolen and going somewhere else. But I think the chances are very limited for anything like that to really happen. They are proving that they want to bankerize Venezuela. They are now going full fledged Nicaragua, full fledged North Korea. This is what they will become. They are now talking about forbidding all the political parties other than the PSUV, the party of Maduro.
They will probably keep some other parties for the show which are just, you know, like marionettes of the, of the, of the main party similar to what happens in North Korea, where there are two or three other parties other than the regime party, but it's only for the show when they have no power at all. So they, something similar could happen there anytime. They could. They could arrest Maria Corinna Machado, the leader of the opposition.
If they do, she will certainly become the Nobel prize for peace, but that will not deter them.
They are not doing that, although there is already a judiciary warrant against her, but they are not arresting her because they don't want that kind of publicity for her, etcetera. But that's crazy because there was a similar warrant against the elected president and still they let him flee the country. He had been taking refuge in the dutch embassy and then in the spanish embassy, but they allowed him to go to the airport and be taken here by a spanish air force plane. So that was with the cooperation of the Maduro regime. How can they do that if there was a judiciary warrant against this man? So you can see what kind of dictatorship, what kind of banana regime Venezuela is right now. They may do the same to Maria Corinnae. If that happens, that will certainly create a lot of turmoil. But again, the Venezuelans are so tired and so afraid and they are legitimately afraid because the regime is absolutely brutal in the way it behaves and in the way it kills. It's now resorting to even kidnapping kids, like kids below 14 years of age and they are being kidnapped from their parents, and parents very often do not even know where they are now. The situation is really abhorrent from a human rights point of view. And I think that it is the time for bravery for the countries in the former group of Lima to sort of reunite and do something of this. Some of the latin american countries do have excellent elite units that could do something in Caracas to at least try to either catch Maduro and Diosdado Cabello and other members of the elite or else, I don't know, support any potential breach in the armed forces, which is unlikely because they are all bought by the illegal money of gold and silver and cocaine and you name it. They have all kinds of legal and illegal riches that they are.
And many military do make much more money from all those illegal trades than from their official salaries. So this is why the army is so united compared to other countries where there are similar situations. It's very difficult to change.
[00:29:03] Speaker B: I want to mention something related to concepts because we usually talk about, you know, objectivism, liberalism, socialism, communism. And of course, it's not the same being a socialist in a country like Venezuela, in a socialist, in a country like the US, for example. And it's interesting because right now, one of the strongest voices against this regime in Latin America is Boric. He is the president of Chile, and he defines himself as a socialist. So today I feel like, and I see that Nicolas Maduro, he doesn't talk about Marx or engels. He speaks about, you know, he says, Patria Muerte, like homeland or death.
And he even follows a cultural agenda or a social agenda, like quite similar to that of the, like some right wing populist leaders.
For example, he says, he talks about the moral decadence of the west, of the western civilization. For example, in Venezuela, there is no same sex marriage, for instance.
This is a question that I want to ask to both of you. Do you think this is more of a nationalism or a nationalist, the populist regime?
Like, when can we say that there is socialism or there is communism? And of course, what is communism at the end? Like, right now, even the Communist Party from Venezuela rejected Nicolas Maduro and they accepted the new president as the winner of the elections.
We can see many socialists or people that describe themselves as socialists in Latin America talking about the importance of rule of law and democracy. So things are kind of like twisted, right? Things are changing. What do you think about, what do you think about this topic?
[00:31:16] Speaker D: Well, if I could take that up for a second.
It's a notorious, long standing thing that it's very hard to tell the difference in practice between communism and fascism, that socialism and national socialism are variants, in fact, where they were, the one was born out of the other national socialism. The fascist movement in Italy was. Benito Mussolini was a leading socialist from a leading socialist family before he then developed national socialism as a new variant, a new, more stronger variant on socialism. And I think they're united ideologically by one idea. And this, the idea that is the appeal, the longstanding appeal of socialism and the reason why you get it so widely accepted despite its disasters. And that is the one idea behind it is the idea of the subordination of the individual to the collective, the subordination of the individual to supposedly society as a whole. Now, society as a whole doesn't exist. There is no such entity as society. It's just other people. And so in the, in practice, it always means subordination to some group or gang or party or leader.
And so, but at the same time, this idea that everything should be subordinated to society as a whole, the individual should sacrifice his interests to the interests of society, that is such a well established moral idea going back hundreds of hundreds of years, going back thousands of years, that people will continue to believe, yes, this must lead us to utopia. This must be the right answer. Capitalism must be bad because it allows for self interest. And socialism must be great because it subordinates the individual to the good of society.
And like I said, they have to keep trying it and keep finding out that what actually happens when you subordinate the individual to the good of society is you're giving power to a ruling party, a clique, a faction, or a dictator. And. And that's why you always end up, first of all, going into poverty, because you suppressed the individual initiative of the people in the country. And also because you've allowed, you know, power, unaccountable power, to a leadership group that then loots the country. And you always end up ending up with a dictatorship.
And then what form the dictatorship takes. It often mutates. It starts out looking left wing and ends up looking right wing. You know, start talking about, this is notorious that when Hitler took power in Germany, they had actually had a term for it. They called them beefsteak Nazis, and it was former communists who converted to fascism and became Nazis. They were called beefsteak because there were brown shirts on the outside and red on the inside, like a steak, like a properly cooked steak. And so this is ideas that it's always been fluid that you can change back and forth from communists to fascists because they're really just variations on a theme. They're. They're relatively superficial differences.
[00:34:21] Speaker C: Yes, I fully agree with Rob on this, and I would like to. Well, I'm sure that many of you have heard about the horseshoe theory. The horseshoe theory, which says that the left side of the horseshoe and the right side are, in fact, closer together than they would be to the center, you know, to the mainstream ideologies, to the conservatives and christian democrats and classical liberals and social liberals and social democrats, or even the greens and the regionalists or whatever there exists in each country, the far left and the far right would be, you know, if you take the shape of a horseshoe, they would be closer together. Well, I think that is already outdated. The horseshoe is no longer a horseshoe. It is a ring. The far left and the far right have now united. In fact, they have united for a very long time already. Back in the 1920s and thirties here in Europe, it was common to talk about what they called the brown red or red brown movement, which was this mixture of the two. And there was, for instance, a part, a faction of the national, sorry, the National Socialist Party, Hitler's party in Germany, which was leftist, believe it or not. And they were purged, of course, in what was called the long knife night at one time. But Otto Strasser and all his followers, those who were not killed, they existed, and they lasted longer than the Third Reich itself, and they went into the fifties and sixties. And some of the ideas currently developed by people like Alexander Dugin in Russia are very much connected to this kind of, this line of thinking, which is a mixture of far left and far right, and they have existed in different shapes in different countries. And I very much agree with Rob, this exchange of members and ideas and capital and voters from the far left into the far right and vice versa, has happened very many times already. And it is no wonder that a large part of the current far right here in Europe, which is searching very, very quickly, is so much connected. And the world, for instance, all of those parties do have a workers union, which sounds like something from the left, but all these far right parties do have a workers union, and they are populistic in a way very similar to what the Chavista left would do at the beginning of the Chavez regime in Venezuela. And I just wanted to respond to one of them questions that I have seen in the chat by our viewers, which is about whether the venezuelan regime is likely to do something in terms of banning the x social network, former Twitter in the country. Well, it has already. It did before Brazil did a few weeks ago.
Yes. The most important social networks have all been forbidden in Venezuela, all of the international tv networks. Also, Venezuelans are starting to resort, well, they have been for quite some time already to do things similar to what the Iranians do, which is creating their own satellite dishes with whatever materials they find in order to try to stay informed from around the world. And the Internet may be switched off any moment. The main social media platforms have already been switched off, and they will end up in a similar type of intranet rather than Internet, similar to what North Koreans have if things continue the way they are. So I think that, again, the only solution for Venezuelans is for us from outside to do something about the regime, something really strong. And unfortunately, at this point, that may only be possible to do with an armed intervention of some kind, which should be very surgical, very limited, very specific, very targeted to the key people that need to be removed in a way or another, or hopefully just caught and taken to the Hague, to the international criminal court to be tried, just like Milosevic from Serbia was long ago.
And I think that this is unfortunately, the only possibility at this moment. And I see one question about my country. How does Spain compare to Latin America? Less socialistic or more? Well, I think the differences are vast.
Luckily, we are in Europe. If we were somewhere else in a different regional context, I don't know. I think that we would have taken the venezuelan path long ago. Luckily, we are sort of fixed by the European Union and the Council of Europe and other institutions that prevent us from going the way that latin american country, unfortunately, can go. Still, we have a terrible cabinet right now. The socialist party is not just the socialist party, but it has. It is.
They have a junior member of the cabinet coalition, which is really far left and which are trying to intervene. All prices, groceries, prices, rentals, whatever, you name it. And so the situation is quite bad. But luckily, I think we are far away still.
We are not there yet. We are still far away from a situation like the venezuelan.
[00:40:12] Speaker D: So my question would be, if someone were to intervene, and I definitely think that we should.
I'm getting a little bit of echo here. Sorry. I definitely think that we should be, like I said, we should be getting international community together to actually be more active, to beat back authoritarianism and dictatorship where it rises up. But if someone in the region in Latin America were to intervene, my question is, who would be doing it? I don't know the region well enough to basically to say who would be taking the leadership on that? Who'd be willing to take the risk? I know Colombia has a long stand. Well, they fought back their own leftist insurgency for many decades, and I know they have a lot of conflict with Venezuela, but they're also not big enough, I think, to. To do this on their own. So who would be taking the leadership on that if not the United States?
[00:41:04] Speaker C: Yeah, that's a very good question, because unfortunately, the answer is not very clear. It is a real pity that Colombia has fallen in the hands of Petro, in the far left. And because Colombia, because it is the obvious neighbor, and the country which has like 2 million Venezuelans territory, or more than that, it could be the logical country to start an operation of any kind. Although I think that the land invasion would be a disaster, and it's not really advisable. It's better to try to do some very surgical things in Caracas with some people, and that's it. But the problem is that, yeah, Colombia would be one key partner to this, and they are not on this. So the other countries, like Peru, Chile, even as Antonella was pointing out, Chile has a left cabinet, but still they are on the good side of the road on this issue, on the venezuelan issue right now, and several other countries in the region could be coordinating their efforts and doing something. In the end, it is not so much that is needed. You don't need a very vast military operation. You need some commandos, some special forces, the equivalent to the navy Seals in some countries. Even tiny Guatemala has one of the best renowned navy SeAL type commandos, which is called the Kaibils. And they could be wonderful. And the guatemalan government is more aligned to the anti venezuelan than some other countries. So I think it would take a lot of coordination and I think that the US should be there.
The type of participation should be like, it shouldn't be seen as the US conquer in Venezuela. It should be seen as a genuine international effort led by countries which are friendly to Venezuela, which are in the same cultural orbit as Venezuela is and which after the request by the legitimate president of the country, the elected one, they decide to do something in a coordinated way with international clearance by the Organization of American States, for instance. And when they do that, the US can of course have some participation because it has the best army in the western hemisphere and in the world. But it should be done in a way that it doesn't look like the US conquer in Venezuela because that would have collateral damage in the long term. That would not be welcome, unfortunately.
[00:43:48] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:43:48] Speaker B: So I wanted to mention something. I don't think there would be, honestly, I don't think there will be like an intervention. I don't think it can be an intervention in Venezuela at some point. I mean, I don't recommend that.
And when it comes to the perspective of Latin America, of course, like every single country here has its problems. We have a, you know, a huge rate of poverty, inflation. Every single country is suffering from something. So like there's no, there's no way something like, like an intervention will happen in Venezuela. And I think this is something that needs to come from inside the country. Of course, they tried everything.
And to be, I mean, I want to be like realistic and of course pessimistic when it comes to this because I mean, I have seen this many, many, many times.
We have Cuba. I mean, I feel like Venezuela will become al second Cuba. And I say this and I am extremely pessimistic because again, Venezuela, the country is Maduro's personal company, is his own land. I mean, he owns that. And same thing with many people behind Nicolas Maduro. Like he's sometimes, I mean, he's kind of the face of it. But there you have Tarek Elisami, you have, you have many people that have a lot of businesses in Venezuela. You have Iran, you have Russia, you have Turkey, you have many, many countries doing business inside Venezuela with this dictator that we can see when it comes to Maduro. But now I want to switch to another, another thing, again, something related to concepts, and it's the term, the concept of populism.
I want to talk a little bit about rule of law and the importance of rule of law and respecting rule of law.
And of course, there is no rule of law in Venezuela. Like, for example, I always try to bring this example because it's interesting. They have already have 27 constitutions. And I always ask, like, the audience or like, I'm pretty sure many people from the US, they are, like, listening to us.
Like, can you imagine, like, having 27 constitutions, like, having a president changing the rules of the game, change in the institutions.
That's terrible. And that happened in Venezuela.
So we know Maduro is a dictator. We know Chavez was a dictator too, and both of them were populists too. And my question for both of you is, like, how would you describe, or how would you identify a populist leader? Like, what would be the, the top three characteristics to identify one of these leaders that could come from the left and also from, from the right. But what would you select the, you know, the characteristics to identify them?
[00:47:10] Speaker C: If I may? I think the populist leader is someone who is not the main feature, which is different from any other type of regime or any other type of leader, even undemocratic, is that the populistic one will resort to creating his movement, his or her movement, more with the hate that they can project onto a boogeyman that they can create than with the love that they can receive for the ideas they put forward. In other words, it is effective in any political movement to just put forward a set of ideas, publicize them, and see who comes to the club, see who comes to say, well, yes, I agree with those ideas. I want to be part of the movement, but it is more effective than that to just create an enemy, an internal or external enemy, a foreign enemy. It's normally both, normally a foreign enemy and an internal type of people who are considered to be the internal enemy. The fifth column, which is making the whole society rot, and who are the, you know, the internal enemy that should be defeated because they are tearing their country apart, etcetera. And then when you have, when you create this hate for this particular group or for that particular foreign enemy, then it works better unfortunately, hate, hatred is a better glue than love is, unfortunately, and it works. And there was an argentinian philosopher, Ernesto Laclau, who was a Marxist, and he created this whole theory about populism, and he was in favor of populism, and he sort of described it, and he proposed this to use to create an enemy which is credible, which creates sufficient fear and hate and disgust among your supporters. And then their supporters will flock and they will help you attain your political goals. And it is working. And many people in the far left, but also now very many people in the far right, are just following Mister Laclaw's ideas, and they are doing this new wave of populism, which both in the left and in the right, is really destroying what we, what political scientists call the liberal democracy. Rob was talking at the beginning about this sort of situation in which democracy is sort of shrinking around the world. And he is right. There is a political scientist, Farid Zakaria, a well known one in the states, who said already some time ago that there is a recession in democracy. The number of electoral democracies was growing around the world until then, late in the nineties, and then it started shrinking. And he said that, well, we are now in a recession, and we could go into a depression in terms of politics, in terms of political regimes, in terms of liberal democracy. And this new type of populism is to be feared, because very many people who are frustrated, who are just angry with the establishment in the countries, with the deep state, or with the established social and political elites, they will resort to populism. They want some kind of populism. And then it will be the left or the right, depending on the country, depending on the particular situation, who will offer a viable channel, a viable movement to do their populism. But they want populism. So it is a very complicated situation right now. Population populism is on the rise everywhere. North America, Latin America, Europe, you name it. And this may be also a reason for us to start thinking about ways to better protect liberal democracy, about ways to better educate the population, about political institutions and economic institutions and the importance of freedom, because unfortunately, many people do not link the political governance system to the amount of freedom, both social and political and economic, that they have in their daily lives. But it is very much linked. And populism is, of course, the enemy of the freedoms that we have. And if we lose what we have built in the western world, at least over the past 50 or 75 years, then I think that we are going to see a lot of loss in our personal freedoms in the decades to come.
[00:52:15] Speaker D: Yeah, I think there's a lot of lessons to be learned from what's going on in the world right now, and including in Venezuela. And one of those about what the root of populism is, because I see the defining characters of populism as being that I am in favor of the people, but with the people defined to mean just some of the people, but not all the people. And I think it comes from this internal contradiction of the idea of the supremacy of society over the individual, that when you say the individual has to be sacrificed for the greater good of society as a whole, well, who is society as a whole? Who constitutes society as a whole? And the populace comes in and says, well, people like me, my gang, my group, the people who support me or who have the lifestyle I like, who are the race that I prefer, whatever. Whatever twist and variant they give on it. And anybody in our society who is one of the people but who doesn't support us, he's not really one of the people. He's the enemy. He must be supported by those foreign. He must be a foreign agent. And the foreign agent is one of the. These foreign agent laws that they've used in Eastern Europe to target these people. And so it really comes from that premise of rejecting individualism, rejecting the idea of the individual as the basic unit of society, society and the thing that needs to be protected, and embracing this idea of, well, somehow the good of the whole, the good of the collective, is going to take precedence over. Over that. And sorry about the cough there.
And in practice, that always means verging into some version of populism where you claim the people is what I define it to be. It's my group, it's my gang, it's my faction, and everybody outside. And pretty soon you get to the point where you have actually a minority faction claiming to be the people, and the majority of the country is not the real people and has to be suppressed.
And that's the lesson. I mean, the philosophical lesson that we're getting here is that populism is another form of anti individualism that leads to the same route of tyranny.
[00:54:21] Speaker C: Yes, absolutely. Populism is one of the worst types of collectivism, in my opinion, because it is simplistic and it appeals to the gut feeling and to the basest sentiments of the people, not to anything noble or rational in their social misogyny.
[00:54:44] Speaker D: The pretense of ideology.
[00:54:47] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:54:50] Speaker B: Lawrence, so you're there?
[00:54:52] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:54:53] Speaker B: Okay. So I know we have a huge audience from Venezuela, many people visiting in watching our videos, I want you to tell us a little bit more about what we have, like what kind of content we have. And of course, send a message to the younger generations of Venezuelans. You know, encourage them to keep fighting, to keep fighting for freedom in. It's a hard path. It's a very, very long way.
But we need to conquer. We need to have a free Venezuela, and the world needs to look at Venezuela. And don't forget Venezuela.
So, yeah, just want you to mention a little bit about what we have, what kind of contents we have. Where can people from Venezuela access to our content?
Can you tell us a bit more about that?
[00:55:56] Speaker A: Sure. Let me just first say thank you, everyone, for doing this webinar, I think you all covered some really great topics here. But in case those of you who are watching, whether on X, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, wherever, those of you, if you're not familiar with the Atlas Society, a big part of our mission is to try to promote these ideas of Ayn Rand, these ideas of liberty all over the world. And a big part of that is in Latin America. Of course, we have the invaluable support of someone like Antonella going out to all these places, Peru, you've traveled all over, and I know that we've highlighted that in our newsletter. But if you really want to learn more or get these materials in the hands of fellow spanish speaking individuals, we have you covered. First and foremost, we are hard at work translating a lot of our materials, our pocket guides to objectivism, post modernism, capitalism, socialism. Many of these are already translated into Spanish, and those can be found through our website, atlasesociety.org books. Or you can check out our various social media pages for links to these materials. And along with, especially on YouTube and Facebook, translated video content. A lot of our really popular draw my lives, which I've already been seen by lots of people in Latin America. It's one of those audiences that we've had always been very impressed by in terms of the number of views these videos get in regards to topics about Venezuela or other questions of collectivism, socialism. So there's very much a need, and we at the Atlas Society are trying to help fulfill that need. And if you want to help us with that effort, as we wrap up here at the top of the hour, I do encourage you to check out our website and know that even though we are a nonprofit, this can't, especially because we're not. We're a nonprofit. We can't do this without generous donations from people like you. So please check out our website, check out the written content and if you want to send a few bits of support our way, check out atlasaddy.org forward slash donate. So again, I want to take a moment to thank you, Rob. Thank you Antonella. Thank you Juan, especially like I said very late over there in Madrid right now for taking the time to join us today. And for those of you watching next week we're going to be talking more about Latin America. Our CEO Jennifer Grossman will be back but she will be talking about Nicaragua. We'll be speaking with a former political prisoner, Felix Baradriaca. So we'll be getting his view into what happened under the Daniel Ortega government and his political persecution and his work now that he has been able to leave and come to the US. So again, everyone, thank you so much for joining us today and we hope to see you all next time. Take care everyone.
